Hey everybody,

Just wanted to put out a general informational post for people down the line that end up tinkering with Windows XP MCE; if you're getting errors about the Media Center application not being able to read the disc ("Cannot Play DVD - The DVD may be in use by another application. If all other applications are closed, the display resolution may need to be lowered or the display connection type may not support the playback of the DVD. For more information, please go to help"), it's very likely the decoder you're using!

I tested this on a dell vostro 200 slim pc with a low profile radeon hd 5570 gpu (catalyst 10.2), and after wasting so much time testing (I thought maybe it was my card not being able to pass some DRM, perhaps my disc drive, perhaps my drivers), I found out the decoder I was using (PowerDVD 7) was the issue. There's a utility out there called the "Windows XP Video Decoder Checkup Utility" that'll (supposedly) confirm whether or not your decoder is good; it said my PowerDVD 7's decoder was adequate, when it was definitely the issue. I looked into using NVIDIA's PureVideo decoder, but from what I found online, there are only trial versions available that'll just eventually expire (love that), so on my last attempt to get the windows media center application in MCE to playback dvd's natively, I tried WinDVD 8, and it worked!

This was just one of the last things I tried, and I wasted a lot of time on troubleshooting other stuff, so I wanted to make sure this was out there somewhere to help somebody out down the line 😀
If somebody smarter than me wants to add on to maybe why I couldn't get PowerDVD's decoder to work with the Media Center application for dvd playback, definitely add that to this post!

Cheers,

- RubDub